We All Had Super Powers Once

An article at Cracked.com explores the fact that every human being on the planet is born with super powers, from telepathy to heightened senses - we just grow out of them.

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's super babies! Scientists love studying babies more than they enjoy studying rats and monkeys, mainly because babies are so delicious much more similar to real human beings than animals are.

What's that? Babies are human too? I beg to differ, and science begs to differ as well. If babies were humans, would they be able to read minds?

Of course they wouldn't, and they can't, but they do have powers similar to mind reading that baffle scientists on a regular basis. In an article called "5 Superpowers We All Had as Babies (According to Science)," Cracked's Cezary Jan Strusiewicz explores some of the amazing things babies can do before they grow up and become annoying preteens.

For instance, mind reading. It isn't really mind reading, but scientists have found that babies are able to read subtle facial expressions in the adults in their lives so acutely that it verges on supernatural.

In 2007, the team at the University of Washington Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences conducted an experiment with 18-month old toddlers found they become so sensitive to the subtlest psychological changes in a person's expressions that it might actually explain why they always cry when you come anywhere near them. They can feel the deep-seeded hatred for all things baby under that fake smile of yours.

This strange power even extends to animals, according to a Brigham Young study that discovered that babies under six months could match a dog's bark to its picture without ever coming into contact with the animal. Bizarre!

Of course then we grow up and it all turns to crap.

Sadly, these amazing abilities get lost the minute the babies learn how to talk and get their hands on Twitter, becoming the modern age nonverbal-communication cripples. Before that though, they are basically Lil' Professor Xaviers.

What other powers do babies have?

How about extreme eyesight? Another study, conducted on a herd of six and nine month old children found that the younger babies could discern between two different monkeys, while the older babies could not. This tells us that somewhere between six months and nine months, babies get stupid. How does that happen?

The thing is, adult brains are very busy and don't have time for such trifle things as actually "seeing" colours. From the time we acquire language (seven to nine months old), our brains start perceiving only the "idea" of a colour rather than the real thing, unlike all the toddlers who see the world for what it really is. It's like us adults are living in a perpetual Matrix where everything we see is a lie, and all infant babies are Neo.

Babies also have hypersensitive hearing. Unlike adults that have developed the ability to filter out non-essential sounds, like air conditioners or our bosses asking us when this article will be ready, to babies, every sound is essential, and they can hear things happening in the next room as if it were happening right in front of them, hence all the crying.

Babies even have stronger brains than adults.

Humans are born with around 100 billion neurons, same as the number of stars in the Milky Way. However, without a large number of synapses, having lots of neurons is like owning an impressive gun collection with only peas and carrots to load them with. By age three, babies have around 15,000 synapses per neuron... three times as much as an adult in his prime.

Unfortunately, the adult mind can't deal with that much information being processed at all times, so our synapses get trimmed as we age, which Strusiewicz likens to "chopping off most of your gigantic dick because there was no woman on Earth capable of taming it".

The point here is we need to take a short break from whining over not having real super powers so we can lament the ones we did have that disappeared as we became so-called productive human beings.

In this case efficiency comes in the form of boredom and filters, otherwise we'd spend every moment of the day fascinated by the incredible world we life in, as opposed to the rare occasion we see a rainbow.